More n00b gun questions...

BruiseLeee

BruiseLeee

Joined
Sep 7, 2001
Messages
5,946
I have a creepy triggered SKS. How well should one be able to hit at say... 200 meters with the open sights? :confused:

I stuck an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper at 200 and tried to put some holes in it. I'll not post the picture so as not to embarass myself. :o
 
Bruise,
Until more learned members (DAVE!) chime in, I will give ya this...

SKS=mediocre accuracy

I have had about 5 sks's over the years...The best that I could do with open sights @ 100yards was around 4.5"...200 looked like a shotgun pattern..lol

Try shooting at a man sized target at 100 then move back about 25yards when ya get the groups where ya want them...Getting all the shots on the target is pretty much my goal...Everything else is just gravy!! :thumbup:

Sks's are not precision weapons...FUN weapons but not nearly as accurate as we have come to expect here in the US of A!!:D
 
If you hit the target once at 200 yards with an SKS you've probably done better than me. lol! But my Mauser, that's a different story...

Maybe two rounds would hit paper.

:D

Take care.
 
The SKS isn't bad. It is more accurate than the AK47.

Bruise, keep practising, and relax. Have fun. Yell aii yii yii several times before shooting. All the SKS's I ever shot have been sighted in for long yardarge by the factory- optimistically so. If you want to know what is happening put the paper at the farthest range you can still hit and keep moving it back. Use a large cardboard box so you can monitor high and low hits off target. Bring a roll of tape to patch holes.

Remember to have fun.

munk
 
Bruise?

The sight setup on the SKS is designed for quick production and simplified training of soldiers, not precision. (Or efficiency. Or effectiveness, for that matter.) Don't expect anything amazing unless you have a well made SKS AND ammunition that it likes AND a good trigger AND are a very experienced shooter OR it has a properly mounted scope. (And receiver cover scope mounts do not make for a properly mounted scope.)

If you're not sure whether it's you or the gun, the next time that you're at the range grab a shooter with a good looking target who's shooting open sights and ask them to shoot your SKS. (I don't expect that they'll have a problem with it.) If they can't hit crap either, switch the ammo. If that doesn't solve it, there may be a problem. We won't go there just yet.

What Leatherface said. SKS = mediocre accuracy. Consider that the weapon was designed to hit a man at 250-300 yards. Figure on the torso as being (on average) a 20"x20" target. How far away can you hit that most of the time? Most folks can hit it from 200-300 yards...exactly what this carbine was designed to do.

Your SKS is probably fine, and you are probably shooting it fine.

Stories about the rifle's accuracy are like stories about the truck's gas mileage and the size of the bass. If you weren't there to see it, take it with a grain of salt.
 
Hold the phone guys. Did y'all note the odd capitalization in the title of this thread? That's Bruise's subtle way of letting us know he's been assigned his "Double Oh" number, and now has a license to kill.

"The name's Leee, Bruise Leee" (cue the theme music) :eek: :rolleyes: :p :D

Sarge
 
So this is probably average for an SKS.

I was rolling up the target for the walk back to the bench so the other folks wouldn't see who was making holes all over the place. :o

200m.jpg


200 is the furthest where I go. I guess I could start digging into the berm but people might get mad. I figure most of it is luck as I can only see the white of the paper and I have to aim at the top of the sheet.
 
Those are battlefield hits. And despite what Dave Rishar says, experts like CE Harris disagree with him- slightly. I guess it's all just in the words, but when Dave says mediocre, I think, 'modest'.

I once got a 1.5" group at 100 yards with a Chinese pin barrel SKS.

You might imagine from this post I'm contending against Dave's technical know how or Bruise's international spy status; nothing could be further from the truth.

I do know James Bond has never been issued an SKS.


munk
 
If you fired six rounds, that's fine. If you fired 50 rounds, however, we may have a problem.

Troubleshoot. Remove variables. Have someone else shoot it. If no one else can do better, the problem is with the gun and/or ammo.

The fact that you mentioned that you can't get an adequate sight picture tells me that there's a potential for improvement. Try a target with a larger aiming black.
 
I think I fired 20. :( 10 were on the 2 setting with the funky sliding rear sight. I reckon they all missed. The other 10 were aiming at the top of the paper with the 1 setting. I did nick the paper to the right of the number 7 though. I'm counting that as a fatal hit. :)
 
Bruise;

What are you firing from? A bench? A rock? Your heels?
I think a lot of the SKS accuracy problem is ammo based- old lots of issue stuff and differing pressure curves in the combustion.

munk
 
munk said:
What are you firing from? A bench? A rock? Your heels?
I think a lot of the SKS accuracy problem is ammo based- old lots of issue stuff and differing pressure curves in the combustion.
Click to expand...

The range has some benches ,blocks of wood and little sandbags.

The ammo was Hungarian that was sold as "may or may not be corrosive". It leaves little black sooty marks on the target. I think this increases the chance of infection. :)
 
in the samples of surplus stuff I've seen measured, the velocity variations are enormous. You can't get good accuracy from that.


I think of the SKS as a 3" gun at 100 yards, and reports from hunters and handloaders sometimes are better. The AK47 is a 4" to 6" 100 yard shooter.

munk
 
BruiseLeee said:
So this is probably average for an SKS.

I was rolling up the target for the walk back to the bench so the other folks wouldn't see who was making holes all over the place. :o

200m.jpg


200 is the furthest where I go. I guess I could start digging into the berm but people might get mad. I figure most of it is luck as I can only see the white of the paper and I have to aim at the top of the sheet.
Click to expand...

Bruce,

With 7.62x39 ammo I have never been able to get much accuracy beyond
50 yards. I would say your's is par for the course.

n2s
 
Thanks for all of the information. At least I'm not too far off average. If someone should laugh, I could just mumble something about that darn commie ammo. :rolleyes:

I'm improving slowly.

I should post the pics of my first .22 target at 15 meters.
...darn commie ammo...:o
 
Bruce,

It sounds like you may have taken gun handling classes from this guy.

Don-Knotts--C10042352.jpeg


n2s
 
Bruisee, that isn't medocre at 200, it's tack-drivin' at 50.

Shoot more; be happy.

I haven't seen corrosive 7.62x39 in a while- does it say "Product of Elbonia" on it? Comes in a plastic tin.


Mike :foot: :D
 
BruiseLeee said:
...darn commie ammo...:o
Click to expand...
Remember the commie military doctrine - this is not an ammo (and weapon) for a well trained and valuable marskman. Russians and Chinesse never cared how much lives of their own people they waste - Stalin said "naroda chvatit" which means "we have enough of people".

So Russian style weapons are all the same, simple, robust, cheap, and able to hit a humansized target at 50 meters - weapons for a raw untrained recruit, some village boy who will die in the first attack and nobody in command will really care.

A quote from a manual on a (Mosin based, 7.62x54R) sniper rifle model 54 which I own: "the weapon is considered zeroed when you can cover 4 hits at 100 meters with a circle 8 cm in diameter, placed so that the circle center is matched to the centerpoint of the group".
Truth to say that the rifle can do better than that, and for military use this is enough, but you can see that the pinpoint accuracy is not the most important criterium here. :)
 
Long as you can hit a monkey on a motorcycle, you can save your neighborhood from almost certain destruction, and come out a hero. Chicks dig monkey menace mitigating macho men. :cool:

50.jpg


Sarge
 
Bruise? Yeah, I've got more to say.

A couple of threads ago I slugged the bores of the two SKS's that I currently own, a late nineties Norinco and a Yugo milsurp that was made God knows when. (As I understand it, Zastava is still cranking these suckers out.) The Norinco slugged out at .001" over nominal, the Yugo .002". The Yugo is the better shooter. Neither is a tack driver but the Yugo is acceptable.

My quick-and-dirty method of judging acceptable accuracy is to sight it at 100, confirm at 150/200, and go to the plates. The plates are 8" or so and are about 180 yards away. I ought to be able to thump them with a six o'clock hold with the sights set on 200. If the sights don't jive I'll play around with the hold until I figure it out. A rifle should reliably produce clangs from the bench, prone, or sitting. That's my standard. Other people have other standards. An SKS in good repair, with a good barrel and ammunition that it likes, can do this.

Consistancy = accuracy. If everything is the same every time, we'll hit every time. Improving accuracy is the process of removing variables. Some of them are ammunition variables, some of them are rifle variables, and some of them (all too often, at least in my case) are shooter variables. We need to do everything the same way every time, or as close to this as we can manage. Removing variables should be the first step in troubleshooting a rifle that isn't shooting as well as we think that it should.

So...

Stop adjusting the rear sight in the middle of the string. Get yourself a front sight adjustment tool (or improvise one) and zero the weapon at 100. The SKS sights are graduated in meters. My range (and your range as well, it seems) is graduated in yards. 100 meters = 110 yards, give or take, so the difference is not really significant at the sort of ranges that an SKS is normally fired at. Dial it in at 100, set the rear for 200, and try the target again. If the results are not satisfactory, try using the 100 or 300 settings with the appropriate hold. Once you've got that figured out, shoot from the bench or prone (don't be afraid of using the sling here) and fire a group for score. Fire groups of 3-5 rounds; more than that shifts the workload from the rifle to the shooter. Call the fliers. Call the hits. If possible, have someone spotting the shots.

If it still doesn't shoot right? We have other things that we can look at.

Everyone owns, or knows someone who owns, a given rifle that produces 1-2 MoA with a given brand of ammunition. The only ones that I actually see doing this on a regular basis are the ones that cost a lot of money and are fed the right kind of ammunition. Milsurps are a bargain, don't get me wrong, but we're sometimes left with unrealistic expectations of what they can do. If every Mauser/SKS/AK/Enfield/M-N/whatever produced 1 MoA reliably, there would be no market for high end firearms.
 
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